


and every night, we dance to warm his lovely bones

by Bluecoeur (vietbluefic)



Category: Critical Role (Web Series), Faerie Folklore
Genre: Abduction, Alcohol, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Fae, Alternate Universe - Fairy Tale, Cautionary Tale, Chasing Faeries, Dancing, Dark Magic, Dark Mighty Nein, Deals with Faeries, Drabble Collection, Eerie, Elves are Not Faeries, Essek Can't Help But Be Intrigued by Things That Will Hurt Him and I Know This and Love Him, Essek Thelyss-centric, Fae & Fairies, Fae Mighty Nein, Fae Morality, Faerie Dancing, Faerie Ettiquette, Faerie Folklore - Freeform, Faeries doing Faerie Things, Gen, Implied/Referenced Abduction, Magic, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Scary Faeries, The Danger of Fairy Rings, Very Mild Horror Elements, fairy rings
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-07
Updated: 2021-03-06
Packaged: 2021-03-12 12:13:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,429
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29260284
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vietbluefic/pseuds/Bluecoeur
Summary: Unconnected short stories, in which Essek meets the fey.1.Don't join their dances. You will never leave.2.Don't make deals — or do at your own peril.
Relationships: Essek Thelyss & Caleb Widogast, The Mighty Nein & Essek Thelyss
Comments: 20
Kudos: 68





	1. the rule about revels

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Something very short and self-indulgent. Scary faeries are the best faeries, and okay, maybe I think Essek should be (lovingly) kidnapped. lol.
> 
> I hope you enjoy this little blurb, thanks for reading! <3

The fey are beautiful, and Essek is breathless for that as much as he is for dancing.

It was a bad idea and he knew it. He has grown up on the warnings, was nursed and fed and raised by them. Everyone says the same thing.

_Don’t watch them. Don’t join their dances. Don’t take in their food and drink. Don’t fall in love._

With the first, it’s because the fey value their privacy, and thus Essek had tried to make sure to keep his nightly spying a secret. This night, as with every night, he’d snuck out and picked his way into the forest, where the little ring of toadstools sits nestled under a willow. Swiped the stolen ointment over his eyelids, a creation of his mother’s; a mixture of beeswax and figseed and some unfortunate drow’s ground thumb-bone. She uses it to spy on the Seelie Court, and so Essek wanted to make doubly sure that he wasn’t caught.

Stupid, stupid. The fey smelled the bones, and the figs, and the familiar labor of the bumblebees. They’d only tolerated him because they found his wonder flattering.

Even so: “I ought to pluck out your eyes,” remarks the fey man who discovers him. With red-hellebore hair, and the glowing blue eyes of a cat, he is beautiful and horrifying where he hauls Essek to his feet, and spins him into the clearing.

So Essek cannot breathe, just like he cannot stop moving. The fey dance and dance and dance, and between them Essek is pulled and flung and ripped to pieces, his limbs with theirs a rainbow, his eyes wide open to their mad joy. He switches partner after partner after partner, each strange and colorful enough to blind. A horned girl laughs into his neck. A woman pale as bones touches his hands. A tall lichen-beast, a sea-green warrior, a dark lady draped in blues, a woman of mushroom-brown-and-yellow. And a devil, who grins with fangs, and sears into his brain the afterimage of red eyes, so that Essek flinches back and aches to scream.

He doesn’t — only because each time, he’s spun back into the arms of the red-haired fey before he can, who catches him and his hands are coarse and rough even through the back of Essek’s shirt.

“I like you,” says this man with hellebore hair, very soft. “So I won’t let them hurt you. Drink.”

He slides his cheek against Essek’s and dances them away from the others, whom Essek had noticed are sipping from glasses stained as fingers from berries. More than once, they’d pushed these to Essek’s mouth, banged them painful across his teeth. He’d turned aside, because the liquid inside smells more of mud than wine, and because his instincts shrieked that to drink from their cups would kill him. Would gag and choke and drown him.

But now, the blue of the fey man’s eyes fill Essek’s vision, and Essek is boneless, more at ease in his arms than he ever has felt in his life. His legs tremble. His feet throb within his muddy leather boots. Sweat pours down his face, and exhaustion sweetens him sick and feverish. The fey man tips the cold rim of a glass to Essek’s lips, and Essek swallows. He tastes spice and fruit and the deep, bleeding heart of a tree.

“Are _you?_ ” Essek manages to ask at some point; he can’t tell when. The moon hasn’t moved. The stars above don’t look at all like the right ones. How long has he been dancing? “Going to— to hurt me?”

The fey man kisses Essek’s eyelids. His lips come away grainy from the ointment. He winds a lock of white hair around his finger, which is itself blackened: like a stump after a wildfire.

“Only if you let me,” he murmurs, which Essek knows isn’t an answer at all.

* * *

(He can’t decide whether that should frighten him, or more so the fact he can’t bring himself to care.)


	2. the rule about bargains

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Got inspired yesterday night to write this, and so I've decided to make this oneshot into a collection of short drabbles instead. There's something about writing Essek interacting with the fey that pleases me deeply... Lolol does this count as writing (emotional) whump, just with faeries....?
> 
> Nonetheless, hope you enjoy this one too!

“I want to know everything. The truth of everything. I know you can offer me this, and I’m willing to give something of fair value in turn.”

The fey man smiles, but pity gathers along the corners of his mouth and makes him look as though he’s very sorry Essek has said this.

“What would you give?” he asks anyway — just like Essek knew he would. He shifts forward in the tree, and the boughs creak as if leaning with him. “What will you offer in exchange for open eyes?”

“Seventy-seven years off my life.”

Essek lifts his face, unafraid, confident, proud of himself. What is this, after all, against the centuries he’ll still have left? It is a good deal, and an easy, paltry price.

“Seventy-seven. A good number to your folk, yes?”

“You gamble with high numbers, my clever shadow-hands,” murmurs the fey man. He lowers his chin, stares at Essek through red eyelashes, and the blue of his eyes smolders like bioluminescent flame. “It only means your loss will be all the greater when it comes to collect.”

“I am not afraid of dying.”

The fey man regards him for a time. Then he shifts, stretches out a pale hand. Stretches out speckled fingers like bones: knobby at the knuckles, tapering elegant towards the dark nails. Essek stiffens before the man traces the shape of his mouth slow and considering. The fey man pulls back, and curls his fingers, looking at them as though he cups something delicate within his palm now.

“Even our descendants the eladrin can lie,” he says, soft. “How much more so you, little _dökkálfr,_ who shares not a drop of our blood?”

Impatience blooms a pointed flower in Essek. He bares his fangs, draws himself upright, and demands, “I’ve satisfied the summons. I’ve presented what I want. Do you or do you not accept my offering?”

“I do. I have.” The fey man does not blink, only gazes at him, somber. “You shall have your desire.”

The grass under Essek’s feet shivers.

Then gives way entirely.

Essek moves on pure instinct; he shoves a hand inside his cloak and tries to toss out a magpie’s feather even as he plummets. To his shock, however, nothing happens. He gasps aloud and catches a glimpse of the fey man’s hands — glowing hot-bright magical — before the earth swallows him whole.

Darkness, darkness, suffocating silence. Just for a moment. He crashes into firelight and crystal and a banquet table that smashes under his weight. Pain booms through his body with a sickening, red-black jolt, and he gapes for air that won’t seem to come. The back of his head is wet. From blood or spilled wine, he can’t tell. All around, voices exclaim at his appearance and laugh and chitter. Breathing hard, Essek looks up wildly and finds a horned girl with flowers in her hair, peering at him from the crowd. She grins, wicked in her delight. There are too many teeth in her mouth.

“W-Wh— No,” Essek whispers. Then, he screams. “No! No no no _no!_ ”

“Seventy-seven years.” The fey man looks down at him, locks of copper hair draped over his burning-blue eyes. His face is handsome and hungry and cold as apathy. “Given to us, freely and willingly. You said.”

“No! NO! This wasn’t what I meant! I didn’t mean for—!”

“I know what you meant,” says the fey man, very matter-of-fact. “You just didn’t specify.”

Essek stares, terror beating in his throat like a trapped butterfly. While the fey revelries continue on around them, a sweet, frenzied nightmare of color and drink and horrifying beauties, the fey man kneels. Plucks a bloody splinter of glass from Essek’s darkening hair, and takes his face between bone-finger hands. And if Essek were truly the fool he now felt, he might’ve mistaken the emotion shifting across the man's face for pity again — gentle, sympathetic, and human. He might’ve tried to beg: _Please. Not this. I have a mother. I have a brother. I have a_ life. _Seventy-seven years here will lose me_ millennia, _and I can’t. I can’t. Please, please. I take it back._

He can't even if they'd let him; he'd sealed the summons in iron, and holly-berries, and his own blood rubbed across his lips.

Essek glimpses the fey man’s hand in his periphery — where the fingertips stain dark, dried red, smeared against the palm.

“Why do you weep?”

The man draws his knuckles across Essek’s damp cheekbone. His irises spark, bright eager blue.

He whispers, “Come. Come now. I have much to show you.”


End file.
